The Holy Muslim month of Ramadan may start on Friday (or maybe Saturday for some more ornery Muslims). Saudis claim they will start on Saturday because they can’t confirm seeing the moon crescent yet. So Ramadan will most likely start in most Muslim countries on Saturday (on Shabbat as our Jewish neighbors would say).

So in the spirit of Donald Trump’s recent initiation in and conversion into the joys of Wahhabi regional sectarian politics, and many billions of money, in Riyadh. He is now an honorary Wahhabi. All during that first meeting of his Axis of Corruption, so:

Happy Ramadan, Mr. Imam Shaikh Trump.

Happy Ramadan, Haji Gauleiter Bannon.

Happy Ramadan, Shaikh Herr Sturmbanfuhrer Miller.

Happy Ramadan, Melania and Ivanka for surviving the staged stag events of last week and withstanding the thick air of hypocrisy and corruption. Just scrub yourselves well, ladies, use disinfectant if you must.

Happy Ramadan, to whoever else is lurking in the Dark Side.

Donald, may those many billions of dollars stolen by the Arab potentates from the Persian Gulf peoples always be with you. You are now an Honorary Muslim, although of the Wahhabi Sect. A founding father of a new axis, your very own Axis of Corruption extending from the Persian Gulf to Africa and beyond.

“Prominent Egyptian activist and lawyer Gamal Eid has said that security officials prevented him from travelling from Cairo to Athens early Thursday morning amid what he describes as a campaign against rights campaigners critical of authorities. “A late decision was issued. I’ve been prevented from travelling and I’m returning from the airport! What a law-respecting country,” Eid, director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights, wrote on Facebook early Thursday. Eid was barred from leaving on a dawn flight bound to Athens after his name was found on a no-fly list, airport officials told Aswat Masriya news website. Eid said that he was not provided with a reason for the ban.…………”

This is not new. Across the Arab world and the rest of the Middle East tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands are banned from travel abroad for political reasons. It is not called Internal Exile, but that is exactly what it is, a form of forced exile within a country. What Arab officialdom and media term as “man’a min al-safar“, Banned from Travel (Abroad). It is done to punish people who criticize a regime or displease it.

Every Arab country has tens of thousands of these Internal Exiles, and so do non-Arab Middle East countries as well. The computer age has made this cruel form of punishment easier to enforce and expand and monitor. From Bahrain to Riyadh to Cairo and beyond, those whom the regime deems loudly unfriendly to it are “Banned from Travel Abroad”.No, it has nothing to do with terrorism, this form of punishment preceded the age of Wahhabi terrorism, but it has expanded now and “terrorism” is occasionally attached to placate some Western governments and NGOs.

Mostly it is below the international radar, this huge Arabian Gulag of internal exile. An internal prison. If they are not in an actual brick and mortar prison, then they probably do not exist to the outside world. Most are not charged with any crime. But there are probably as many or maybe more of these forced internal exiles as there are political prisoners kept in cells.Other advantages to the regimes: these forced internal exiles, the “banned from travel abroad” are cheaper to maintain than formal prisoners and not as ‘obvious’, and they are below the international radar. A cruel Arabian Gulag that is ignored by most of the world.CheersMohammed Haider Ghuloum

“In Syria, where the Saudis are a leading backer of rebel groups including the secular Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, which includes less militant Sunni fighters, Riyadh still has some options to influence the outcome of the war. But in Iraq, its most populous neighbor, with which it shares an 850 kilometer (530 mile) frontier, Saudi Arabia has few tested friends or established links with Sunni groups, and knows that the majority Shi’ites will continue to dominate power……….”

So these authors wrote their report for Reuters, mainly with local interviews from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. They quote some Iraqi ‘analyst‘ who works from Abu Dhabi and is, as they claim, “close to the Saudi Interior Ministry“. They don’t clarify how “close” this analyst is to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, and in what “capacity“. But we know that the Ministry of Interior does not do foreign policy. We also know what it does do: arrests, interrogations, prisons, public floggings, executions by public beheading with occasional crucifixions, religious police, immigration, travel bans, internal exile, external exile, among other things. In effect they run a vast Arabian Gulag.

Odd this assertion: Iraq and Syria are represented as serious problems for Saudi Arabia. But how did Iraq and Syria get to this stage? How did they get to represent serious problems to the region? Yes, you got that one right: because the Wahhabis started sending their intolerant ideology, their killers, their weapons, and their oil money, first to Iraq and then to Syria.

They started on Iraq early on, somewhere around the year 2005. In Syria they waited until the misnamed so-called Arab Spring reached Homs (or was it Der’a) and then the Wahhabi and Salafi and Ikhwan machine went into full gear to try and take it over. With a little help from the Turkish leaders who thought they could open their country to Jihadi traffic into Syria and remain untouched.

They created the monster that now threatens them and that the Iraqis and Syrians have to deal with. If Iraq and Syria ‘pose’ problems for the princes, they are problems of their own creation. They and some other potentates in Qatar and other emirates and their Salafi money-gathering machine. And their misguided underemployed frustrated young volunteers looking towards the joys of captive women as they await the promised unlimited virginal rewards of Paradise.